down by rock and rut, under such conditions. We
were very soon convinced it was best to leave the wagon to its load of
sole-leather, and walk through the mud to Sydney.

After mouldy Halifax, and war-worn Louisburgh, the little town of Sydney
is a pleasant rural picture. Everybody has heard of the Sydney coal-mines:
we expected to find the miner's finger-marks everywhere; but instead of
the smoky, sulphurous atmosphere, and the black road, and the sulky,
grimy, brick tenements, we were surprised with clean, white,
picket-fences; and green lawns, and clever, little cottages, nestled in
shrubbery and clover. The mines are over the bay, five miles from South
Sydney. Slowly we dragged on, until we came to a sleepy little one-story
inn, with supernatural dormer windows rising out of the roof, before
which Boab stopped. We _paid_ McGibbet's kirk-fine, wagon-fare, and his
unconscionable charge for his conscience, without parleying with him; we
were too sleepy to indulge in the luxury of a monetary skirmish. A pretty,
red-cheeked chambermaid, with lovely drooping eyes, showed us to our
rooms; it was yet very early in the morning; we were almost ashamed to get
into bed with such dazzling white sheets after the dark-brown
accommodations of the "Balaklava;" but we did get in, and slept; oh! how
sweetly! until breakfast at one!

"Twenty-four miles of such foot-travel will do pretty well for an invalid,
eh, Picton?"

"All serene?" quoth the traveller, interrogatively.

"Feel as well as ever I did in my life," said I, with great satisfaction.

"Then let's have a bath," and, at Picton's summons, the chambermaid
brought up in our rooms two little tubs of fair water, and a small pile of
fat, white napkins. The bathing over, and the outer men new clad, "from
top to toe," down we went to the cosy parlor to breakfast; and such a
breakfast!

I tell you, my kind and gentle friend; _you_, who are now reading this
paragraph, that here, as in all other parts of the world, there are a
great many kinds of people; only that here, in Nova Scotia, the
difference is in spots, not in individuals. And I will venture to say to
those philanthropists who are eternally preaching "of the masses," and "to
the masses," that here "masses" can be found--concrete "masses," not yet
individualized: as ready to jump after a leader as a flock of sheep after
a bell-wether; only that at every interval of five or ten miles between
place and place in Nova Scotia,